Like sunshine, rugby league hangs rarely over the heads of the good people of London but, following the eye-catching example of the office girls in the park outside my office who have today stripped to their underwear to perpetuate their tans, I can’t help but to bask in this shiny glimmer of rugby league that the Melbourne Storm have today afforded me.
And what a glimmer it is for this isn’t just your ordinary, run of the mill type rugby league. This is frontier rugby league; Melbourne rugby league.
What more lengths did the American pioneers go to to subdue the wild west? How less deviant were the crafts of our own forefathers in their hoarding of convict slave labour?
This, they will say in years to come, was how the South was won. By forging both hook and crook did rugby league stake its claim in those so distant lands where the locals resisted with iron insularity and even amongst the heartland was often found cold relations and jealousy.
And here too was our great hero Waldron who, with the conviction that invigorates none like the newly converted, did plant the seed. And, oh, what a seed.
Twice did he raise Melbourne’s cup to the lips of the mungo gods, and yet they hung and quartered him, shed him of his premierships even when he had left the fold.
And what had he done?
Had he fouled a mate’s shoe like happy Julian? Did he put around his digit another’s ring, like fighting Hopoate? Did he include his teammates in his most personal relationships or strike the face of a women with a hand, glass or forehead?
Hell, did he tear an entire code in half with Ribot’s delusions of Asia or take clubs long held and passed within the hearts of the generations who had built them and hawk them off like discount rugs at a bank holiday sale?
Sweet and merciful, did he give the game away to a petulant newspaper man who turned a blind eye as depravity, celebrity and vacuity engulfed the game’s culture till it spewed out nothing but obscenity after proud obscenity on the back pages of his own best selling tabloid taking with it the few meagre rags that still clung to the game’s sweaty dignity and honest self-interest?
No, he did what he thought had to be done.
He gave rugby league its best chance at breaking Melbourne and he gave Melbourne its best chance to love rugby league.
In times of war and colonisation, such men make heroes. It’s a hard truth, but then, all the good truths are.
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